5 Barista Love Lessons

"Love is different than you think."
-Caedmon's Call

A few years ago, my husband and I had just moved back to the States after our time as expatriates in China.  After several months of living with our parents and seeking out our next direction, we moved to New York City.

It is hard to know when I've gotten God's voice right, but it seemed like His main objective for me in New York was to make me "a great lover of people".  This was the phrase that kept going around in my head.  If he is the great teacher, this was the name of the course, and there were units and learning goals and some serious homework.  My time in the Big Apple often felt like open heart surgery, as I was both amazed and broken by the circumstances around me and the goings on of my days there.

I have seen the Father continue that work in me to this day, as if I am in a new level of coursework for my master's degree of Great People Loving.  Actually, who am I to flatter myself?  I may still be in 1st grade...or just out of the womb.  But sometimes it feels like grad level work, and it's comforting to think that there is a trajectory to all of this.

It's pretty interesting that the Bible says that God is love.  Not just that He is loving.  Instead, love is a person.  Love is someone.  And when I examine the longings of my own heart, that makes perfect sense.  I don't, at the pit of me, crave something.



I crave someone.



Our pastor in New York, Neil, became our friend.  He and I share a love of words.  We both relish well-crafted phrases.  I even wrote him an old English style poem for his birthday one year, complete with the words "hiddle-dee-day".

He shared with me this quote about loving people:

There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.  That it is work, day labour, day labour, God knows there is no other word for it.  And look, added to this is the fact that young people are not prepared for such difficult loving; for convention has tried to make the most complicated and ultimate relationship into something easy and frivolous, has given it the appearance of everyone's being able to do it.  It is not so.  Love is something difficult.

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life.  They have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.

-from Rilke's Letters on Love*

If life is a degree in love, I have been doing my field work lately as a barista at Starbucks.  It's been great, hands on experience, very character shaping--love as "day labour" in its truest sense.

5 Things I've Learned About Love at Starbucks

1. People are difficult.  (Me included.)  We are, none of us, what we were originally designed to be.

2. "You are human!" is a very healing phrase.  When confronted with fact #1, use grace.

3. Love is strong.  When I am hurt, the warrior's choice is to not take it out on the people around me.  It is easy to be bitter--it takes loves muscles to be kind.

4. At the end of the day, it's just coffee.  People are more important than things.  If I treat them as if they are the most precious thing in the world, then my priorities are straight.

5. Love must be sincere.  You can fake happiness, but you don't have to be bubbly to be kind--and kindness is a very powerful force.




Maybe in Matthew 10:42, when Jesus talks about giving "a cup of cold water" to someone, he really meant a cup of joe.






*Neil wrote this as the source, but I couldn't find this book listed online.  It may, instead, be from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

This blog post contains my own opinions and viewpoints, and not necessarily those of the Starbucks corporation.  It never hurts to put that in there.